(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of processing documents, in which each document is subjected to a reading operation intended to identify information carried by the document and an operation involving recording fresh data on the document. It also relates to apparatus for processing documents by this method.
(b) Description of the Prior Art
Methods and apparatus are known for processing documents such as cards, checks, money orders, invoices, envelopes, or similar documents, in which the information carried by the documents may be analyzed automatically by optical, magnetic, or other methods, the information then taking the form of marks, perforations or printed characters which can be identified both by the human eye and by an automatic reader. Apparatus of this nature is widely used in businesses having a number of branches, such as agencies or banks, for example, each branch being equipped for this purpose with one or more of the pieces of apparatus and each piece of apparatus being connected to a central computer which is sometimes very distant from it.
In apparatus of this kind, such as that which is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,207,505, for example, the documents to be processed, having first been placed in a supply magazine, are extracted from the magazine one by one and are fed along a track, which is generally formed by rotary drive rollers or conveyor belts, so that they pass successively under a reading device and a recording device and are finally channelled into a receiving hopper. As a document passes under the reading device, the information carried by the document is read and transmitted to a data-processing device such as a computer. When the reading operation has been completed, the document is fed under the recording device, which then records fresh data on the document.
However, such apparatus proves ill-adapted to processing documents, such as cheques for example, which carry both pre-printed information which can be identified by an automatic recognition device and hand-written information such as the date or the amount of a debit or credit which, since it cannot generally be identified by such an automatic recognition device, calls for a keyboard to be used to enable it to be fed into the processing device. Because on the one hand, the hand-written details on such a document cannot be fed in, by means of the keyboard, until the pre-printed information on the document, relating for example to the drawer's account number or to the Bank number, has been identified by the automatic recognition device, and because on the other hand the documents, when in the apparatus, are virtually never at rest between the moment when they are moved forward to pass under the reading device and the moment when they are discharged into the receiving hopper, it is in fact very difficult for the operator to see the hand-written information and consequently it is virtually impossible for it to be transcribed onto the keyboard. A way of enabling the operator to read the hand-written information carried by the documents would obviously be to stop the document momentarily at the time when it was leaving the reading device but this procedure has the disadvantage that the forward movement of the documents is interrupted each time something has to be transcribed onto the keyboard and thus considerably reduces the processing rate of the apparatus.
The present invention overcomes this disadvantage and provides both a method and an apparatus for putting this method into effect, which enables documents carrying both information which can be read by the human eye and information which can be identified by an automatic recognition device to be processed at a relatively fast rate, each document having fresh data recorded on it after the information which it carries has been read and processed.